Drawing Words, Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
This book was recommended to me by a friend (hi C-ko!) who is also interested in graphic novels and their cousins, and I am really enjoying it. It is written as a textbook that could be used for a course on creating comics. I really appreciate the combination of bare-bones basics (i.e. this is a “live area”, this is page ratio, this is how to approach lettering) with a real openness to wild variation in content and style. “How to draw Comics” and “How to draw Manga” books have left me completely cold, even as I get more and more interesting in working in “sequential art”, but this I feel like I can really dig into and learn from without feeling like I’m being stuffed into a box.
Storytelling, narrative arc, framing and working up alternate “shots” for scenes is covered in depth, and reproduction is covered well-enough to get you started.
There is supplemental information on the website, especially useful for someone working through the text not in the context of a class. Also, Matt Madden’s other book that is beloved in this house is 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, which lives in the bathroom, and is probably as useful to writers as artists.
Note: this is not really a “how to draw” book — there is some discussion, but nothing style specific, and it certainly wouldn’t substitute for, say, a book on figure drawing. But this really feels like a strength, since they can concentrate on the structure of comics, and specific skills like inking, without trying to dictate look and feel.
I can tell that this will probably become a well-thumbed addition to my technique shelf, and it has made the idea of telling the novel-length idea that I thought I couldn’t draw as a graphic novel form instead seem possible, if still extremely hard.
I am looking forward to the potential second volume that they mentioned would cover things like coloring and webcomics.
